Mapping crime

The Information Commissioner’s Office has published guidance on crime-mapping to balance the transparency benefits of doing this with the privacy risks it can pose. The guidance notes that publishing exact household-level information will generally constitute the processing of personal data and is likely to breach the first data protection principle. In assessing whether the publication of a crime-map complies with the Data Protection Act various factors will be taken into account, including the level of detail, the regularity of data uploads, the sensitivity of the crime, the information recorded on the map and the availability of other sources of information which could allow the identification of individual